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At 1:33 PM -0600 8/23/06, Theo de Raadt wrote:
> > I've created a diff for the ntpd to store the pid
> > in /var/run/ntpd.pid.
>
>In general we no longer believe in pid files.
>
>They have a tendency to lay around sometimes after processes have
>died, and thus you cannot send a signal to the number in such a
>file. If you do, you may kill some other process. They are just
>not worthy of trust.
>
>Please use pkill and pgrep instead, which will give you up-to-date
>information.

Fwiw, FreeBSD added a -F parameter to pkill and pgrep, which
reads in a pidfile (given with that parameter), and also allows
you to specify the process-name that you expect that find at
that pid. So you could:

pkill -F /var/run/ntpd.pid ntpd

to make sure you're killing the process you expect to be killing.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu